Back in 1998, the first year Amazon.co.uk started selling books, the UK government commissioned a review of the banking sector. The resulting Cruickshank Report, published in March 2000, recommended opening up the payment systems to increase competition.
The aim was to make UK payments faster, that is, to ensure access to funds within a couple of hours of any payments being made, rather than within days. This resulted in the launch of the UK Faster Payments Service (FPS) in May 2008, one year after Apple launched the iPhone. FPS reduced payment times from days with the older BACS system to typically a few seconds.
